Dog Years   On a wall in my living room sits a collection of framed pictures, paintings, and art. In one print, a bear holds a mandolin. In another, an opossum sits, jaw open at its widest, with a banjo in hand. There’s a photoshopped portrait of my dog as a decorated war general, another of one of my chickens dressed as a farmer. There’s a clock that chirps a different bird’s call on the hour and a shadowbox of pinned butterflies. Towards the top center of the wall, there’s a canvas printed picture of two husky puppies sitting on a restaurant bar top, looking directly into the camera. Th ..read more

  Photo Credit: Gonzalo Pedroviejo Gomez, obtained and licensed through Unsplash.   River in Egypt   There is a turquoise-colored china hutch in the corner of my office that holds some of my favorite trinkets and mementos. Two of these items — glass quartz turtles — live side-by-side on the top glass shelf, staring into the opposite corner of the room with small eyes that look like they were dotted on with a black marker. They probably were.    The bigger turtle is about six inches in length and heavier than it looks. My father brought it home for me when I was 9 year ..read more

  Photo Credit: Laura Fehrman, obtained and licensed through Unsplash.   Someone’s Father   The summer after my senior year of college, while reeling from the wild disappointment of not receiving any departmental awards, nor the creative research grant I applied for, I felt like such a failure. My classmates were off to bigger and better things after graduation, and I was the only one who still had one last semester to complete. One was headed to New York for a job with Scholastic, and another landed a job as an assistant at Fred Rogers Productions. A third was headed to the Un ..read more

  Photo Credit: Debby Hudson, obtained and licensed through Unsplash.   Kathy Kay   Dear Mom,    The day before you died, I hugged you in the hallway of my childhood home. The framed photos to the right, just before rounding the corner into the kitchen, were hung too closely together, and yellowed from the sun shining through the front door. Your bones looked so thin under the soft cotton of your T-shirt. You smelled like you.   ***   Things between my mom and me weren’t what one would call “fine,” but that was nothing new. I was seven months pregnant, and A ..read more

  Photo Credit: Suzanne D. Williams, obtained and licensed through Unsplash.   Growing Out of it   You are seven and you don’t know the word “suicide”, but you understand what it feels like. You understand wanting to die, but you don’t understand why you feel this way. You try to tell someone. They say, “do not say that,” so you do not say it again.    Your body hurts on the inside, like your stomach is cramping and at night you lie in bed and cry as if you are being attacked. You do not like nighttime, but being with people is also hard, so you say goodnight and read ..read more

  Photo Credit: Nate Dumlao, licensed under Public Domain and obtained through Unsplash      Clean Bodies   Days before the coronavirus reaches the U.S., I’m in Bangkok with a broken pelvis. The fracture is in my right pubic ramus, a small piece of bone near my hip socket that sounds too intimate to share with strangers. It’s a common fracture for the elderly, but mine happens when I am thirty-three and running across a dark highway with two friends. They make it across but I’m not fast enough, and the motorcyclist who hits me can’t stop in time. The collision knocks ..read more

  Photo Credit: Valk Fisher, original image.    Image: skin (see ‘Connective Tissue’)   Skin: A Case Study   OBJECTIVES      Identify and understand: ●      principal layers and functions ●      histories of inflammatory response ●      factors contributing to healthy scarring ●      role in homeostasis, recordkeeping    This is a case I hesitate to make. Its illustrative value is unclear. My study’s limitations came to light like this: It ..read more

  “Fractured Memory” by Grace Katich is the runner-up of the 2022 Debut Prize in Nonfiction for Emerging Writers. Here’s what Touchstone’s Editor-In-Chief, Achilles Fergus Seastrom, had to say about the essay: “‘Fractured Memory’ is an essay that recognizes that experience and understanding are not the same ordeal. Katich deftly guides her audience through the emotional depth of formational life experiences, through the difficult growth of processing, and finally to the peace and clarity of realization. Though deeply personal, ‘Fractured Memory’ is also deeply understandable as a series ..read more

  “To Be Held” by Emma Zimmerman is the winner of the 2022 Debut Prize in Nonfiction for Emerging Writers. Here’s what Touchstone’s Editor-In-Chief, Achilles Fergus Seastrom, had to say about the essay: “The developments of the past decade (COVID-19, gun violence, crises in mental health and education, among others) have left us all wondering how to process our experiences and understand the world. ‘To Be Held’ is an essay that boldly seeks to help us understand ourselves and our experiences. Zimmerman creates space for us all to know we are not alone. Not in our experiences, and certain ..read more

  Photo Credit:: GeoJango Maps licensed through Unsplash    Combination Man I know a little bit about a lot of things. But I don’t know enough about you. —The Mills Brothers I had just accidentally found my birth father in the Social Security Death Index. I hadn’t spoken with him in a few years, I guess, but I didn’t know that he was dead. His phone number was often disconnected. It was nearly impossible to keep track of him. I immediately searched for an obituary, which I found easily online. It lists three sons and six daughters, not including me. I called the funeral home an ..read more